Moonspun Magic (Magic Trilogy 3)

She’d sipped her way through but one glass, while . . . “You’re the one to begin in the lemonade, Rafael. That is at least your third glass.”

“I am a man and much more used—”

“I do believe I have heard something along those boring, quite obnoxious lines before,” Frances said. “Come, Rafael, Victoria isn’t two-and-ten, you know.”

“Thank you, Frances. However, the good captain is fond of giving orders.”

“Well, old boy, I suggest you succumb gracefully or pack your valise,” said Hawk. “Frances, love, turn your cannon elsewhere. Damn, I wish my father were here.”

“Why?” Rafael asked blankly.

“He has the knack of changing a particularly uncomfortable subject, leaving all the principals with their dignity intact.”

“Look, Victoria, it’s not that I think that you are starting on a career of drunkenness, but you’re not used to wine, are you?”

That was true, but she wasn’t a fool. “No more than a bottle a day,” she said. “On a good day.”

“I see,” said Lucia, at her most stately, “that I must intervene here. It is a case of compromise, I believe. Didier, half wine and half soda water. Is that agreeable to both parties?”

Rafael grumbled. Victoria shot him a look and said, “Since the good captain looks ready for apoplexy, I agree.”

Rafael gave her a crooked smile.

“Excellent,” said Frances. “Now we may continue with our gluttony and our conversation. Wonderful sirloin of beef, Lucia. Victoria, do you enjoy racing?”

“Oh, yes,” Victoria said, sitting forward in her chair, her spoonful of giblet soup hovering between her bowl and her mouth, “but I haven’t ever really been to a real race. Once, when I was a little girl, my parents took me to a cats race in the south of England near Eastbourne. It was marvelous.”

Frances was the only one who had never attended a cat race. She smiled and said, “I will watch the cats race and then you must come to Newmarket in November. Flying Davie will run and win, I have no doubt.”

Horse racing was the topic until the ladies left the gentlemen to their port. To Victoria’s surprise, Lucia seemed willing to forgo her nightly glass of port.

“In company, my dear,” said Lucia, guessing her thoughts, “one must bow to convention. Frances, why don’t you take Victoria upstairs and fix her hair? You are on the verge of losing a braid, Victoria.”

“She

wanted us to have a chance to speak alone,” Frances said as the two ladies mounted the staircase. “It’s said that she’s a regular tartar, but I find her the most interesting and charming lady of my acquaintance. She saved my life, you know.”

“What? When?”

Frances smiled. “I would very likely have died in childbirth. Lucia booted out the idiot doctor and saved me and my daughter. I suppose I would do just about anything for her.”

While Victoria chewed over this bit of information, Frances continued in a laughing voice, “And then she proceeded to give Hawk instructions on the care of pregnant ladies. He later swore to me that he had no intention of ever sharing my bed again.” She shook her head and said fondly, “Silly man.”

“And has he?”

Frances grinned. “I should add that Lucia also gave him a lecture on how not to make me pregnant. That was later, of course, and he was ecstatic.”

“Oh,” Victoria said doubtfully.

“Dear heavens, I shouldn’t be speaking like this to you.”

When Victoria was seated at her dressing table, Frances standing behind her and arranging the errant braid, she said, “I suppose you’re worried that I’m taking advantage of Lucia.”

“Not at all. If Lucia has accepted you, and she most certainly has, it is quite good enough for me. But tell me, Victoria, what is all this about your inheritance? Hawk told me just a bit of it, curse him.”

Victoria’s eyes narrowed. “Rafael—a more obstinate man I’ll never meet—won’t tell me a blasted thing. It is too bad of him, Frances. He’s acting as though I am a wilting rose who will lose all her petals if hit with the raw truth.”

Frances’s hands stilled. The light was more than dawning. It was fully risen. Her precious husband obviously knew much more than he’d let on to her. She would gave him a piece of her mind.